It is the ‘Persian Romeo and Juliet’ – a hokey old work full of paper beards, corny wedding tunes and lots of camels. So why has the great cellist teamed up with choreographer Mark Morris to freshen up Layla and Majnun?

Never seen outside Baku … the new Layla and Majnun.
Photograph: Beowulf Sheehan

There was to be no leader, no dominant cultural voice. When Yo-Yo Ma founded the Silkroad ensemble in 1998, the cellist’s vision of an international community of musicians forging a global idiom of music was intrinsically democratic. But democracy has never been choreographer Mark Morris’s artistic style. As Ma cheerfully concedes, whenever the two of them have worked together: “Mark has always been the boss.” It’s Morris who has definitely been in charge of their joint reinvention of the Azerbaijani opera Layla and Majnun, premiered in 2017 and now opening in London.

Based on a Persian equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, and composed from a wildly eclectic mix of western orchestration and traditional Azerbaijani singing, the 1908 opera had never been seen outside Baku before. In the original two and half-hour version, composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli leavened the tragedy with a robust stage energy. “It’s incredibly hokey,” says Morris, when I meet him in his artfully cluttered office in Brooklyn, “with all these camels and men with paper beards and corny wedding music.” But it was this energy that Morris thought was lost in Silkroad’s initial 45-minute chamber version of the opera. “It was “too brief and too gloomy. I wanted some of that kookiness back.”

Morris chose to have Howard Hodgkin design the backdrop, an ecstatic swirl of green and salmon paint that seems to embrace the lovers’ infatuation, and he arranged to have the singers and musicians in the middle of the stage, with 15 dancers working around them. He wanted to create a sense of community, the performers grouped together like a nomadic caravan of artists but there were also practical reasons for this choice.

Hajibeyli’s score features long passages of semi-improvised “mugham” singing, with the vocalists ornamenting their arias differently at each performance. The dancers and singers needed to be in the closest possible proximity, the former picking up on the latter’s physical and vocal cues so that they could embroider the choreography accordingly.

The two singers, Alim Qasimov and his daughter Fargana, are megastars in Azerbaijan, incredibly grand, but they have proved very responsive; if Morris has felt that a particular aria has gone on for a minute too long, the next night they will make it “exactly one minute shorter”. It was Qasimov who suggested the project to Ma in the first place. The cellist had never heard of Hajibeyli’s opera but as Qasimov explained the importance of bringing the work to a new audience he came to share the latter’s enthusiasm.

Layla and Majnun’s tumultuous, tragic story has been fundamental to Islamic culture for centuries and has been reimagined as folktale, poetry, miniature painting, theatre, dance and film, but while it inspired Eric Clapton’s 1970 song Layla this treasure of the Islamic world has otherwise been little known in the west.

Ma is defensively quick to address the issue of cultural appropriation in this project, alert to any suggestion that there may be something politically dodgy about an American choreographer staging an Azerbaijani classic at the behest of a French-Chinese-American cellist. Ma says he fully understands the need for sensitivity whenever Silkroad tackles the music of other cultures, but at a fundamental level he believes it’s a non-issue.

“All culture is a matter of appropriation,” he says with real vehemence. “HELLO! I mean if we’re bothered by it we should first pull down all the buildings in America that resemble Greek and Roman architecture.” He insists that reimagining a work like Layla and Majnun isn’t about colonising other people’s art. “We’re just trying to look at what everyone around the world has created, we’re saying this is really cool stuff – look at this piece of pottery, look at this music.” What matters to him, always, is the integrity of their approach. “Doing any cultural project you have to start from the inside and Qasimov was such a trusted guide. It was he who wanted to take this opera all over the world and if you have a problem, then call him up.”

Morris doesn’t consider himself a political artist, but it matters to him that this icon of Islamic culture is now being so widely seen. “Everyone’s treating Muslims like shit nowadays, and I can at least do this.” Ma concurs: “I think there is a ripple effect from the work we do. People tend to see Islam as just a large religious grouping, but Layla and Majnun is a very personal story, one that everyone can connect to … Politics and economics may create fracture, but culture is our way of understanding each other. It’s our way to survive.”

Morris studied as many manifestations of the story as he could find and researched a variety of regional dance forms from Georgia, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, even Indonesia. His resulting choreography is identifiably Morris in its full-bodied expressiveness but the movement is also rich with very exact stylistic references and quotes including Sufi spins, Georgian running steps and Balkan wedding dances.

While Morris choreographs very quickly, he knows exactly what he wants in the rhythm, affect and shape of every step. One reason he has almost ceased creating works for companies other than his own is that he can exercise so little control over how the choreography is maintained, and knows how easily it can “be turned to hash”.

Layla and Majnun review – Yo-Yo Ma and Mark Morris's swirling tragedy

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The fear of “atrophy and distortion” is also why he’s taken the brilliantly rogue decision to embark on a series of “posthumous” dances. The deaths of Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor have caused anguished discussion about how adequately their legacies can be preserved. Morris, having seen too many horrible reconstructions of dead choreographers’ work, has circumvented the issue by creating pieces that his company will premiere only once he’s gone.

“Everyone is going to die, that’s the one thing we know for sure,” he says. “My solution is to keep some fresh stuff coming out of the grave aside from flowers – and I can have a new dance premiered at my memorial service.”